Healthy Fried Chicken (Gluten Free too!)

Nobody wants to cook fried chicken anymore. It’s just a fat bomb!

When you deep-fry foods, the breading raises your blood sugar in no time (which leads to weight gain). Calories go through the roof. And in an actual experiment in my kitchen, the breading soaked up 10% of its unhealthy deep-frying oil!

Unless you hack it.

You, too can become an expert at hacking foods you would normally deep-fry — like my Healthy Southern Fried Chicken (page 112) or my Family Chicken Nuggets (page 94). Click on images below for recipes.

Some of my readers have a hard time with the old fashioned fried foods. They love fried foods but don’t want to put on the weight (who can blame them?).

They are also challenged with deep-frying foods that always seem to burn, breaks down, soak up oil, or ends up dry.

Here is the exact way to hack “fried” foods.

Which is to say, here is how I make unhealthy fried foods good for you.

As a general rule, I never use white flour or regular breadcrumbs. Why? Simply because both have a high glycemic index and are causing horrendous weight gain.

Finally, as discussed above, deep-frying is just not an option. Oils like canola, vegetable, or sunflower (Avoid them all!) are really unhealthy and I do not recommend them.

As outlined in many recipes in Eat More, Burn More, make your own breadcrumbs by processing healthy cereals instead of white bread. I use Ezekiel’s or Bob’s Red Mill’s gluten-free cereals.

When “breading” foods, follow my 3-step healthy technique (this video goes along with my Family Chicken Nuggets Recipe, which you can link to in the second image above).

The key here is to decrease the Glycemic Load. So instead of white flour, I use coconut flour (very high in fiber and gluten-free). And as I said, instead of breadcrumbs, I use my special homemade crumbs.

Use a combination of baking and cooking spray to achieve the perfect golden brown crust usually associated with fried foods. The “deep-fried,” gluten-free chicken breasts below were made using my 3-step healthy technique and contain no wheat flour, no traditional breadcrumbs, and virtually no oil.

Gui Alinat is a Tampa, Fla.-based American Culinary Federation Certified Executive Chef, published food writer, and the owner of Artisan Boutique Catering. He is the author of "The Chef's Repertoire," and "Eat More, Burn More."
Born, raised and classically trained as a chef on the Mediterranean coast of France, he traveled extensively, working in restaurants around the world.
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